Troubles with the Word 2007 Publish Feature

Yesterday, after finishing my post about the potential for crankiness in the life of blinks, I tried to use the Word 2007 publishing features which had worked for me in the past. After hitting the publish button, the document had the “Published to BlindConfidential at time and date” message added to the top of the document but the article never showed up in the blog. So, in case anything went wrong somewhere in the infrastructure either on my PC or on blogger, I’m trying again, hence the title of this message.

A few minutes later:

I tried publishing this post again using the “publish/publish” buttons but instead of going to the button bar, I used the keystroke sequence: “Alt+H P P” which gave different results. Instead of telling me through the text it inserted at the top of the document that It had indeed published the article, instead, I got a dialogue telling me that Word had trouble connecting to the host and to try again later. This didn’t “fix” the issue but helped in getting to the root cause. I had made the amateur assumption that Word would act the same using keystrokes as it did with buttons which, for no reason I know, it does not.

A few minutes later:

I heard one of the applications currently running (Word 2007 Outlook 2007, IE, Skype) play a sound with which I was unfamiliar. I hoped it meant that Word had, after a long delay, found a way to publish the post – unfortunately, I was wrong. The purpose of the sound, one which I hadn’t heard before, remains a mystery to me.

A half hour later:

I played around in the blog account settings for a while and read some help text about publishing to a blog. I deleted the account in Word and started over. Word told me that my new account had been verified by my blog host with a nice dialogue and a cute sound. I went back to the article which you are now reading, hit the key sequence from above and got the same error about my host being unavailable.

This is starting to really suck…

Finally:

I went to the blogger control panel, found BlindConfidential and hit the link for creating a new post. If the text ends here, it means that, for the first time ever, I managed to get beyond the blogger visual verification by actually understanding its garbled speech. If, however, you read some more text, it means that Susan, my lovely wife, came into my home office and read the verification information off of the screen to me.

 End